OTTAWA— In an epic battle over who’s the boss in Canada, Parliament has scored an important victory over Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s minority government.

And all parties in the House of Commons now have two weeks to prove that they can get along and make that Parliament work, thanks to an historic ruling by Commons Speaker Peter Milliken.

If they don’t, the Conservative government could stand charged with contempt of Parliament and the supreme law of the land.

Liberal MP Derek Lee (Scarborough-Rouge River), the veteran parliamentarian who set this dispute in motion, is relieved and happy and said Canadians should be too.

“The supremacy of their Parliament in holding their government to account has been confirmed by the Speaker. We didn’t invent anything here today. We just dusted it off, gave it a spin and it worked; it’s going to work,” Lee said. “We’ve got two weeks to hammer something out on the detail and I’m very happy. These opportunities to benchmark some of these powers don’t come up very often; like once every 50 or 100 years.”

Milliken handed down his widely anticipated ruling on Tuesday in a bid to settle a standoff between the Commons and Harper’s government over who has the ultimate right to see the documents related to the treatment of Afghan detainees by Canadian forces.

“The House does indeed have the right to ask for the documents,” Milliken declared, in a ruling that also serves as a 14-day ultimatum for better behaviour in the current, fractious Commons.

“The fact remains that the House and the government have, essentially, an unbroken record of some 140 years of collaboration and accommodation in cases of this kind. It seems to me that it would be a signal failure for us to see that record shattered in the third session of the 40th Parliament because we lacked the will or the wit to find a solution to this impasse.”

The battle was about more than documents or even the Afghan mission – it was about who has the ultimate power in Canada and it’s been simmering since shortly after the last election, when Harper was almost tossed out of office by the opposition parties.

The Speaker left no doubt as to the answer to the question of who has legal authority in Canada – he ruled in favour of Parliament on almost every point of the dispute that was thrown in his lap last month.

But it’s not clear whether the government is entirely ready to bow to the Speaker’s decision.

Harper was not in the Commons to hear the ruling.

In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, in fact, the Harper government’s response was terse – just 86 words – and also ambiguous, leaving some doubts about whether the Speaker’s ruling has simply opened up a larger battle that could end up in an election or at the Supreme Court of Canada.

“We’ve just had the Speaker’s ruling,” Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said, reading a prepared statement to reporters, and taking no questions. “We’ll be reviewing it very carefully and we welcome the possibility of a compromise while respecting our legal obligations as acknowledged by the Speaker. The government will not knowingly break the laws that were written and passed by Parliament. Our government will not compromise Canada’s national security nor will it jeopardize the lives of our men and women in uniform. That being said, we welcome the possibility of a compromise while respecting our legal obligations as acknowledged by the Speaker.”

The precise shape of that potential compromise is also yet to be seen. Lee, who’s written a book on parliamentary power, noted that previous disputes of this nature have been resolved, either by specially swearing in MPs to see secret documents or through special, security-cleared committees of experts or former parliamentarians.

Earlier this year, the federal government appointed former Supreme Court justice Frank Iaccobucci to go through the documents and determined what could be released, but Milliken also ruled yesterday that this wasn’t sufficient compromise because he was acting solely for government, not Parliament as a whole. Lee said Tuesday that he warned Nicholson that this wouldn’t work, but he’s sure that Iaccobucci will have some role in whatever “mechanism” is set up, as the Speaker directed, to get the documents released.

Milliken attempted to spread the blame around for the impasse, lamenting in his ruling that trust and accommodation are rarities in this current House of Commons.

“Finding common ground will be difficult,” Milliken said, noting it was “troubling” that the government didn’t trust opposition MPs with information in the documents.

“The insinuation that members of Parliament cannot be trusted with the very information that they may well require to act on behalf of Canadians runs contrary to the inherent trust that Canadians have placed in their elected officials and which members require to act in their various parliamentary capacities,” he said.

But he also chastised the opposition parties for questioning the government’s motives in trying to keep the information secret.

“Some suggestions have been made that the Government has self-serving and ulterior motives for the redactions in the documents tabled. Here too, such remarks are singularly unhelpful to the aim of finding a workable accommodation,” Milliken said.

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